The murder of another person in Minneapolis, a victim of border patrol shootings, presents us with two simultaneous consequences: the American and the global. Granting impunity to a police force that only obeys its leader and persecutes immigrants without warrants or kills those who oppose it is all too similar to the Gestapo when it hunted down Jews and dissidents in 1930s Germany. Countries where the police kill their own people in cold blood in the street and then accuse them of terrorism are called dictatorships. The next step is imaginable: increase tension, provoke the people, accuse local authorities of insurrection, strip them of their constitutional powers, and, under the pretext of preventing riots or armed confrontations, suspend elections in the name of security and public order.
The global fallout is equally clear: Trump's apprentices salivate at the mere thought that one day they too will be able to turn the police or the army into instruments of hatred against immigrants or dissidents, knowing that the impoverished masses need a scapegoat. And if, upon reading this sentence, anyone has thought for a microsecond how lucky they are not to be an immigrant, let them remember that what follows is a state of exception, the detention of anyone who dares to oppose, the outlawing of social and political organizations, and the general suppression of civil rights. Trump is spreading the fear of speaking out, demonstrating, or organizing to the very core of the nation. He started with immigrants because he knows that cruelty toward the most vulnerable has a shameful electoral reward, but it's coming for all of us.
